Shoshana Hebshi and our Fourth Amendment Rights: Fear Itself

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror..."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous words apply perfectly to our present situation, and we would do well to reflect and act on them.   People, we are in real danger in this country right now, and it is because we are namelessly, unreasonably, unjustifiably afraid.  We are trading away our freedoms and protections for the mere perception of a little temporary security. 

Shoshana Hebshi-Holt is an American, a native English-speaker, a young mom from Ohio, flying home after a visit to her sister in California.  She remained in her seat on her flight.  She tinkered with her phone to entertain herself.  And then, after her flight had already landed in Detroit, armed security forces swarmed the plane and handcuffed her, refused to answer her questions, detained her without allowing her to contact anyone, questioned her, fingerprinted her, took all of her personal information including e-mail address, Facebook, and Twitter as well as the usual address and phone number, and strip-searched her.   The suspicious activity that precipitated this extreme, invasive, and unconstitutional response?  Um... nothing.  Nothing. 

Ms. Hebshi-Holt had the misfortune, which you may easily have one day, of being randomly seated next to two dark-skinned men whom she had never met.  The men engaged in the highly suspicious behavior of going to the bathroom at some point during the flight.  Ms. Hebshi-Holt has the additional misfortune of being dark-skinned and dark-haired herself.  You may also have this misfortune, but don't congratulate yourself too quickly if you look like a white-bread Anglo-American.  You know how it goes:  "First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out..."

I urge you to please read Ms. Hebshi-Holt's original post detailing her experience on 11 September 2011.  It is chilling, and it can happen to you.  During this frightening, humiliating, scarring experience, the officials she dealt with either told her nothing, or insisted that the whole procedure was for her own protection.  Far more chilling than her story - which was bad enough - is that some of the commentators on her original post see nothing wrong with what happened to her.  There seems to be a significant number of frightened people in this country, actively throwing away their rights in the name of "safety." 

Another chilling thought:  the whole way in which these events were set in motion amounts to some unidentified, scared, thoughtless idiot - we may never know who - who essentially screamed the modern-day equivalent of "witch!"  and caused an overblown, hysterical reaction, and now we are left with a lot of finger pointing on who said what, and when.  Frontier Airlines defended its crew, saying they were responding to passenger concerns, but the airline abdicates all responsibility for what happened next.  The TSA and the Wayne County Airport Authority both say that it was the airline crew who notified law enforcement and pointed out the "suspicious" trio. 

So here is America: someone yells "Witch!" and the next thing you know, a US citizen who said and did nothing suspicious has her Fourth Amendment rights grossly violated.  We can argue over whether the TSA searches are a Fourth Amendment violation (I think they are), but there is no question that Ms. Hebshi-Holt's rights were horribly violated, with no probable cause whatsoever.  We cannot allow this!  We are one step away from the internment camps of the 1940s, in which American citizens were confined for no other reason than their last names and their appearance, while their sons fought and died for the US.

There are those politicians who rally around the cry to "take back America."  Well, I want to take back America, too.  The one where we had rights, the one where the citizens were America and not a bunch of suspects, the one where we had common sense and went our ways unafraid and with our heads held high.